🎸 Lessons from Carlos SANTANA

5 min readJan 29, 2023

Some lessons from an American guitarist who pioneered jazz guitar

In this week’s post, we look at lessons learnt from a musical genius who spearheaded a revolutionary style of music, Carlos Santana. I took a course taught by him on the philosophy of playing the guitar. It seemed made for experts, as I struggled to play the warmup in lesson one. Despite that, there were some valuable lessons I took away from the course, and I will share them with you at the end of the post.

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Today we are looking at insights I gathered from a course by Carlos Santana. If you aren’t familiar with Carlos, he is a fantastic guitarist who started a band named Santana in the late 60s and is active to this day. They pioneered a fusion of Rock and roll and Latin American jazz. If you haven’t already listened to his music now is a good time to start! I highly recommend this song which I’ve linked at the end of this post.

Although the course seems to be aimed at advanced guitarists, I still learnt many insights about the philosophy of playing the guitar. First, I go over how the course was structured, and then I share with you three lessons that stuck with me. I hope some of his teachings stick with you as well!

Chris Hakkens, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, lightly edited

The course

Recently, I got a MasterClass subscription which is a platform where experts from many fields have courses on their area of expertise. When I browsed through the list of available courses, I found a course titled ‘Carlos Santana Teaches the Art and Soul of Guitar’, which intrigued me. After watching the introductory video, I was intent on learning from this legend about what it takes to play the guitar.

The course doesn’t teach the guitar from the basics as you may expect. Instead, each lesson is focused on the philosophy of playing guitar, in particular, playing for someone, be it at a campfire or for a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden. He focuses more on how you approach a song rather than telling you how to play a song. Therefore, despite not being able to follow along with any of the pieces he demonstrated, I still learnt many valuable lessons from the course.

Lessons I learnt from the course

Although the course seemed to be primarily aimed at experts, there were still many lessons applicable to beginners and intermediates. Here are some lessons that I have taken with me since taking the course:

Lesson 1: Practice as an offering than a sacrifice

Carlos urges us not to think of our daily practice as a chore that we must do. He sees the word ‘practice’ similarly as a sacrifice. A sacrifice of time that you incur to play music.

Sacrifice is like a burden … like it’s hard, and it’s heavy, and you carry it up the hill. And it doesn’t sound like fun.
-Carlos Santana, MasterClass

Instead, he encourages his students to reframe practice as an offering. Time spent playing the guitar is time spent getting acquainted with the music. An offering has a mystical significance, much like how some people offer themselves to a worthy cause. You lose yourself in it and feel your actions have meaning. Through making a daily offering, you get closer and closer to where you want to be as an artist.

I find this reframing to be quite eye-opening. Whereas before, I would dread picking up the guitar and going through my routine, now I feel exhilarated to offer my time to playing the guitar.

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Lesson 2: Play with soul

There is a big difference between playing the guitar by playing what’s on a score and playing with soul. As Carlos likes to put it, you need to get ‘inside the note.’

He means that you must play from your soul, heart, mind, body, and vitals. You need to implement those five elements into one note. As I see it, you don’t want your music to sound like an amateur puppeteer controlling a puppet. Instead, you want your music to sound like Pinocchio spinning and dancing with life, saying he’s a real boy and not a puppet.

In this video, Carlos demonstrates the difference between playing ‘outside the note’ and ‘inside the note.’ Playing outside the note is following a score note for note and keeping yourself strictly bound to the score. Whereas playing inside the note is when you allow your ears and hands to decide instead of a piece of paper. You genuinely feel the music as it’s meant to be rather than what they say it should be.

Lesson 3: Be cognisant of how you carry yourself

Carlos sees a big difference in how others view someone based on how they carry themselves. It is not about your accolades or your material possessions. Instead, he views it as how a person sees themselves and whether they act with integrity. Your integrity and view of yourself will affect how others see you.

This resonated with me when I played live in front of around 50–100 people one time. When I was practising to do that, a YouTube video I watched warned me against self-deprecation in front of my audience. If I say I am no good to my audience, then I am telling my audience how I see myself. Even if I surprise myself with how well I play, they may find me to be no good since that’s how I view myself.

Therefore it is vital to be mindful of how you carry yourself with your music.

How I plan to implement them

Here are some of how I plan to implement my learnings from Carlos Santana:

Daily offering: Give your music an offering of time you can afford every single day
Play with soul: Although you may learn using a material, don’t be afraid to stray away from it
Throw away any doubts you may have about yourself when playing for someone

If you haven’t checked out any of Carlos Santana’s music, here’s an excellent place to start:

I’d love to hear from you. Did you find any of these lessons helpful? Do you hope to implement them in your guitar playing? And if you haven’t picked up a guitar yet, has this inspired you to give it a go? I’d love to hear all about it in the comments below or tweet at me with your thoughts.

That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed learning second-hand lessons from a guitar maestro. These lessons, I think, can be broadly used for any creative endeavour. Like, comment and subscribe to the mailing list below and join others in receiving inspiring posts on a week-ish basis.

Until next time,

Tony

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